THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE frig of Soissons," where he had his capital rather than at Paris. In 486 Syagrius was defeated — and later secretly put to death — by the Salian Franks under the lead of Clovis (481- Conquests 51 1), a name equivalent to the modern Louis, Franks un- wno then gradually took the walled towns of the der Clovis region until his dominion reached the Loire. This was for Clovis but the beginning of a career of conquest. He brought the Thuringians under his sway; he drove the Alamanni out of Alsace and up the Rhine into the Rhaetian Alps; he defeated the Burgundians. In 507 he killed with his own hand the king of the West Goths and forced that people back into Spain except for a strip of land extending south of the central plateau from the Pyrenees to the Alps. Indeed, of this the West Goths in Spain kept only Septi- mania, which extended from the Pyrenees to the city of Nimes, while Provence, which extended from the Alps to the city of Aries, was added to Italy by Theodoric the Ostrogoth, who had come to its relief. Clovis murdered the other kings among the Salian Franks and was also accepted by the Ripuarians as their sole ruler. At his death he ruled all Gaul except the Mediterranean coast and Rhone_Valley, and by 536 his sons had added the Kingdom of Burgundy and Provence to the Frankish possessions. As one contemplates all the usurpations and assassina- tions, all the war and destruction of the confused period of General over a century's duration, of which only a few and effects leading facts have been listed in this chapter and ? f ^ e . of which our original sources do not tell a tenth barbarian & invasions part, one almost wonders, not merely that the declining Empire struggled on in the West as long as it did and that at Constantinople it was to continue its course for several more centuries, but that any peasants remained alive after so much devastation, that any fields were in cultiva- tion, that any cities were still in existence. But the number of invaders in any one expedition does not seem to have been very large and the invading barbarians usually acted without system or policy. When forced to leave one place,
